Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Stroh Stroh, IN

Stroh is an unincorporated community in Milford Township, LaGrange County, Indiana, located on the southwestern shore of Big Turkey Lake in the county's lake country.

Stroh exists because of cement: after valuable clay and cement stone were discovered there in 1899, William Hayward platted the village on September 1, 1899, and first named it Hayward.

On February 15, 1900, the village was renamed Stroh, after Detroit capitalist Emil Stroh, who ran the new cement industry, because Indiana already had a post office with a name too similar to Hayward and the mail would have been confused.

Local tradition holds that the cement industry began when Emil Stroh, visiting family and fishing on Big Turkey Lake, noticed marl on his shoes and had a sample tested in Detroit, revealing the deposits the town was built on.

The Stroh cement works opened in 1900, burning cement out of marl dredged from the marsh and lake bottom, and the village boomed to about 350 people by 1910.

By 1920 Stroh had a bank, a four-story brick school, a Masonic lodge, and Methodist and Christian churches, and the county history of that year called it a Twentieth Century Village.

The Stroh post office was established in 1900, the year the town took its current name.

Remarkably for such a small settlement, Stroh today has five church buildings serving the community.

Census Bureau estimates put the population of the Stroh census-designated place at about 284 people in 2023; the Census Bureau first defined Stroh as a census-designated place in the 2022 American Community Survey.